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Postcard dated early 1900s, from Martha Dickinson Bianchi. The literal translation of the German phrase Englische Kirche is English church. This may be Karlsbad's Anglican church built in 1877.

This postcard, and the ones on the next two pages of the commonplace book, are from Karlsbad, a town located in the Czech Republic near the border of the German state Sachsen and less than 100 miles from Dresden, where the Bianchis married in 1903. Karlovy Vary, as it is known in the Czech language, was a well-known spa, renowned for its medicinal qualities and patronized regularly by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European aristocracy. The spa's famous visitors included Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, Chopin, Paganini, Marx, and Freud, who mentions Karlsbad in The Interpretation of Dreams:

Karlsbad now enables me to account for the peculiar circumstance that I ask Herr Zucker to show me the way. In the material of which the dream is woven I am able to recognize two of those amusing Jewish anecdotes which conceal such profound and, at times, such bitter worldly wisdom, and which we are so fond of quoting in our letters and conversation. One is the story of the constitution; it tells how a poor Jew sneaks into the Karlsbad express without a ticket; how he is detected, and is treated more and more harshly by the conductor at each succeeding call for tickets; and how, when a friend whom he meets at one of the stations during his miserable journey asks him where he is going, he answers: "To Karlsbad- if my constitution holds out".... And further, the name Zucker (sugar) again points to Karlsbad, whither we send persons afflicted with the constitutional disease, diabetes (Zuckerkrankheit, sugardisease.) The occasion for this dream was the proposal of my Berlin friend that we should meet in Prague at Easter. A further association with sugar and diabetes might be found in the matters which I had to discuss with him.

Page 9: Hugo Verse

Page 12: "The Legend of Ishtar"

Notes

Known in other mythologies variously as Astarte, Inanna, and Aphrodite, Ishtar is the goddess of love, war, and fertility. This poem treats Ishtar's descent into the underworld. Among various Babylonian and Sumerian versions of the myth no definitive purpose is given for her descent; however, there are various explanations offered: that she goes to visit her sister, Ereshkigal, queen of the underworld, for instance, or that she goes to seize power from Ereshkigal. Goodwin's poem derives from another interpretation of the myth that portrays her descent as a search for the imprisoned Tammuz, a god whose absence from earth has banished spring and summer, a reading that is reminiscent of the more familiar myths of Isis and Osiris, of Orpheus and Eurydice, and of Demeter and Persephone. To gain access to Ereshkigal, Ishtar must forfeit items of apparel at seven gates, and these losses are referenced in the sixth stanza of the poem.

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